May 2004

By Ken Waln, Edify Corporation

In today's competitive marketplace, contact centers everywhere are installing speech recognition systems to improve their responsiveness to customers. Should you deploy a speech solution in your contact center? The following questions may help you decide.

' Do callers wait in long queues to perform simple transactions such as address changes?

' Do your agents spend valuable time identifying callers, an-swering simple questions and routing calls when they should be providing greater value to customers?

' Do your customers call while driving, so they have to navigate through touch-tone menus with one hand, without looking at their matchbox-sized phones?

' Are you looking for new ways to differentiate your business from your competitors, retain your existing customers and acquire new ones?

If you answered 'Yes' to any of these questions, it's time to deploy speech recognition technologies in your contact center.

Although speech technologies have been available for several years and have made significant inroads in several markets, most contact centers today use simple touch-tone-based voice response systems for the majority of their calls. With the advent of standards like VoiceXML and SALT, and support from major vendors like Microsoft and IBM, speech recognition is quickly moving into the mainstream. Speech systems are poised to bring significant return on investment to contact centers through increased automation of customer calls, partial automation of agent-assisted calls and more accurate call routing within the contact center.

Along with cost savings, speech systems can bring return on investment in less tangible ways. By making your company more accessible, these systems can increase your customers' satisfaction with your service offerings. A well-designed speech system improves brand awareness just as a good Web site does. If you do not take advantage of the benefits of speech, your competitors probably will, and will entice your customers to switch.

Improving Voice Automation
Until now, most speech applications have been deployed in areas where touch-tone systems simply cannot function. The first deployments were in industries like financial investment and travel, where information such as stock symbols or dates, times and destinations were far too complex to enter onto a keypad. Following the tremendous success of these initial speech applications, speech automation is rapidly being adopted in a broad range of industries.

Studies show that callers are much more satisfied by speech-enabled systems and less likely to opt-out to an operator. In a recent Harris Interactive Research survey, nine out of ten consumers said they would derive greater value from speech systems, and 70 percent of users said their experience would be improved by using speech systems versus touch-tone systems1. Several factors are driving this increased acceptance, including improved voice interfaces and the increased difficulty of using keypads on many contemporary phones, especially cell phones.

To speech-enable your current applications, it is important to recognize the differences between touch-tone systems and speech. For input, touch-tone systems rely on the 12 keys of the phone keypad, whereas speech systems can accommodate menus with hundreds or even thousands of options. In the early days, speech systems replicated touch-tone options with prompts such as 'Press or say 1.' These early systems were effective, but they did not significantly increase automation. Instead of reducing the number and levels of menus, they actually resulted in longer and more tedious prompts.

To benefit fully from the capabilities of speech, companies will need to replace the user interface of their touch-tone systems with a new voice user interface (VUI). A good VUI design looks less like a simple flowchart and more like a complex process diagram, allowing advanced users to skip several steps forward at a time, while guiding less sophisticated users through the process.

The real benefits come when you flatten the menu structure, allowing callers to quickly navigate to where they need to go. To do that, a company needs to change the way it asks for information. Since our short-term memory can handle only a few items at a time, long lists of options should be avoided. Instead, companies should ask callers a general question such as, 'What product are you calling about?' or list a moderate number of choices and enable the caller to interrupt when they hear the option they want.

Help prompts and simple decision trees can also be used to guide callers to their desired results. More sophisticated applications use open-ended prompts such as, 'Briefly describe the reason you are calling today.' These advanced applications employ open grammars to statistically infer the purpose of the call. This technique is most practical in call routing applications, which will be discussed in greater detail below.

Callers tend to interact with speech systems much as they do with live agents, so it is important that a VUI have the appropriate personality and tone. Selecting the persona for an application should be done with the same care that a company would take in choosing a spokesperson for its products. The persona of a speech system should enhance a company's brand identity and put callers at ease. In exchange, callers will use the system to its fullest capabilities, thus freeing live agents for more strategic tasks.

Designing a good VUI requires both upfront planning and continual refinement. Designers often start by evaluating inbound calls. They note the way customers ask questions and how they phrase their answers. Then they test various alternatives with a prototype or simulated system. Prior to system implementation, a series of pilot tests and tuning cycles is conducted.

The result is an optimal system that meets all of a company's callers' needs while avoiding the frustrations that stem from confusing questions and misconstrued answers. The entire design process may seem daunting, but a system that is well designed and properly tuned will more quickly reach its potential and maximize the return on a company's investment.

New Automation Opportunities
Although speech-enabling existing automation systems can yield significant cost savings, new applications can extend automation to more complex transactions and create even greater operational efficiencies. With current speech technologies, it is now possible to automate activities that touch-tone applications simply cannot address. Product availability lookups, literature requests, address change and capture and a variety of other common transactions are ill-suited to keypad input.

With a speech system, however, these tasks become quite practical. In looking for new automation opportunities, a company should examine its call volumes and look for high-volume, highly repetitive interactions. In many environments, these can be largely automated with a fairly standard speech application.

Another significant emerging application is caller identification. Using speech print analysis or speaker verification ' a function your live agents cannot provide ' the system can compare the characteristics of a caller's voice with previously stored information and determine if the caller is indeed the person he or she claims to be. Similar to a fingerprint or retinal scan, these systems use biometric data to prevent fraud and simplify access to the system. In contact centers in which it is practical to enroll customers with a voiceprint, this application can provide an added level of security and reduce the need for hard-to-remember personal identification numbers.

Improving Call Routing
Most contact centers use touch-tone systems for routing calls to the correct queue, verifying caller identity and collecting other information up front so the agent does not have to spend time on these tasks. Speech can improve the accuracy of this process and enable it to go further, reducing call length and improving service. The use of touch-tone input to route calls is very successful in simple call centers with only a few obvious choices. If the caller wants a replacement part, for example, should he or she contact sales or service? If the caller wants an airline seat upgrade, is that domestic reservations or the frequent-flyer service desk? Does a digital photo printer fall under the category of personal electronics or computer equipment?

Since touch-tone menus in these situations are often hard to navigate, a large percentage of calls must be transferred from one agent to another. When the number of queues is large, a deep menu with lots of choices may be needed. These choices tend to frustrate callers. Not only are these menus slow and cumbersome, but the customer often reaches the end without finding what he or she was looking for. Next time, this customer may simply ignore the menus and 'zero out' to an operator. All of these factors combine to make call routing in a complex call center a significant cost factor.

Fortunately, speech systems provide a much better approach. By asking one or more open-ended questions, then statistically processing the answers, it is possible to achieve a very high rate of correct routing with a very flat menu. For example, the system might say, 'Briefly describe the purpose of your call,' and based on the caller's response, route the call among dozens of queues with an accuracy of 80 percent or more. The technology used to achieve this is called statistical language modeling, and the grammars developed are often called open grammars. These grammars rely on statistical analysis of the users' input rather than matching every input to a pre-determined set of responses, and can therefore understand a much wider variety of inputs and provide a probable interpretation.

Getting Started
Speech technologies can improve a company's operations in so many ways that it can be difficult to decide what to do first. There is often a trade-off between doing a strategic contact center redesign and a tactical add-on to existing systems. When planning for a speech rollout, it is important for companies to remember that while there is a cost for implementing the solution, there is also a cost for not doing so.

Once a company determines, for example, that an address change application could save it $40,000 per month, the company's management should consider that amount as a cost for every month they delay implementing the solution. By rolling this application out quickly as a first phase of a larger project, a company could potentially save enough money to roll out a more complex phase later. We must, of course, acknowledge and address the realities of corporate guidelines and budgets, but we should keep in mind that implementing a system with a high return on investment in a short period is a good way to prove the technology works.

This kind of analysis usually shows that a phased project with a high ROI in the early phases makes more sense than a large, 'big-bang' project. However, it is also important to have the big picture in mind, so the system and vendors chosen for the first phase can also deliver the subsequent phases.

Speech systems cannot solve all of a business' problems, but they can bring great benefits and a very quick return on a company's investment, improving business and increasing competitive position.

The author is the chief technology officer of Edify Corporation (www.edify.com).

2 Harris Interactive Research study, March 2003.

If you are interested in purchasing reprints of this article (in either print or HTML format), please visit Reprint Management Services online at www.reprintbuyer.com or contact a representative via e-mail at [email protected] or by phone at 800-290-5460.

For information and subscriptions, visit www.TMCnet.com or
call 203-852-6800.

[ Return To The May 2004 Table Of Contents ]